Despite extensive work on cleft constructions, little attention has been given to their functions in specialised discourse. Using a collection of 40 research articles from the KIAP corpus, this study aims at establishing the role of clefts in English and French research discourse. The quantitative analysis reveals a higher frequency of clefts in French. The study also shows that clefts can help authors increase semantic continuity, reinforce the structure of articles and increase discursive coherence. Clefts thus facilitate the readership’s understanding of the argumentation. From a contrastive viewpoint, the study of the different authorial roles – writer, researcher, arguer, quoter, presenter – reveals that English-speaking researchers tend to be more reader-oriented than French-speaking ones. This study thus gives new insight into the way argumentation is built in research articles and paves the way for further research on the differences between French and English research discourse.